Tuesday 29 April 2003

Winning elections

The Scotsman's Fiona McCade writes of the Scottish election:
If only we used the American system, where the person with the fewest votes wins. It’s so much simpler.
Oh dear - another person who thinks that George Bush didn't really win the US presidential election. Bush actually got the most votes because the Electoral College, not the individual voters, elects a US president. There are very good reasons for having a system that gives additional weighting to the smaller states (who might otherwise not have joined the union) rather than using a national "popular" vote. I would have thought that someone writing for a Scottish newspaper would have appreciated the significance of this.

Of course, if the leftist television stations hadn't announced early that Gore had "won" Florida, the popular vote would probably have been won by Bush anyway. Most of the state is in the Eastern time zone but the strongly Republican Florida panhandle is in the Central time zone with the polls closing an hour later. Thousands of voters in the western part of Florida didn't bother to turn out for Bush because they had been told that the state had already been "lost" to Gore.